SME Server:Volunteering
How you can help
What skills are necessary?
Any skill is useful for the SMESERVER project.
If you are a developer of any kind, we will find something for you to do. Even if you think that you have no Linux skills you can still help. You can tell us if and how you understand the wiki pages, or more precisely, we would like to know what pages you don't understand. Thanks to the insights of new users we can continuously enhance readability of the wiki. Visit Communicate to learn how to contact us.
If, on a top of that, you can write, you are invaluable. We need a lot of articles. There are thousands of Linux programs around, and more are released every day. In addition, new versions of existing applications are released. There is need for a lot of hands to write about them and to keep reviews current.
Documentation -Review or Write Documentation, Manuals, and Articles
Documentation for SME Server was inherited from the prior distribution maintainers, e-smith and mitel. Their work gave SME a great base to work from.
The current developers have continued to improve the SME Server software and to reflect these improvements the Documentation has to develop too. These wiki-based manuals have been put in place to allow anyone to update or add new sections where they see fit.
The core manuals have been protected for stability, but anyone can request access to add and update howto and contrib pages to the wiki. If you've got instructions, solutions to common problems, neat tips and tricks, or just a good way to explain something, we'd love to hear from you.
Bug and New Feature Verification
You can help improve SMESERVER by finding and reporting bugs. This helps us to make our software as reliable as possible.
Our bug tracking system, Bugzilla, is used for all SMESERVER Linux products. If you have never written a bug report, please refer to BugzillaHelp to learn what kinds of information make the report most useful.
Your role in that is to report possible bugs only via the bug tracker, and to encourage others to do the same. Refer again to BugzillaHelp for helping with bug fixing and verification, the best way to learn is to fix other peoples' problems.
Programming -Develop Patches and Packages
The most obvious way, for programmers, to participate in the development of SMESERVER is to post a patch as a suggested solution to an existing bug in Bugzilla. Each package has a maintainer, who will contact you to discuss your proposed solution. You may want to join our development mailing lists before you start coding in order to discuss your plans and coordinate with other developers.
For more information about getting source code and building your own packages, read the SME_Server:Documentation:Developers_Manual.
If you would like to build your own applications on SMESERVER, read the SME_Server:Documentation:Developers_Manual to learn how to package your own software.
Maintaining existing Languages
Changes to Existing Language sets are posted to the Translations section of the Bug Tracker.
For a simple change add the original and the new text to a bug report.
For larger changes you can make a patch.
Obtain an original file that you are going to modify, it will usually be a translation of a panel, eg. /etc/e-smith/locale/en-us/etc/e-smith/web/functions/hostentries or /etc/e-smith/locale/fr/etc/e-smith/web/functions/hostentries if a patch from the Bug Tracker is available it will guide you on what has changed [[1]]
make a directory and copy your file there as name.old make a copy name.new and edit it to suit
from the command line create a patch diff -u name.old name.new > name.patch
add this to the existing bug or create a new one in Translations
Donations & Funding Work
Help smeserver.org pay it's bills http://www.smeserver.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=34
Pay a developer to add a feature you would like Email a developer directly with your request or open a bug with your proposal
Be part of the Wiki Team
This page is built with MediaWiki. The concept of a Wiki is that anybody may add and modify content. On Help:Contents, find a quick tutorial if you're unfamiliar with Wikis.
As long as you edit anything on the wiki you are de facto member of the Wiki Team.
To make edits, you need to log in to the wiki. In order to do this, you will need to open an account. The information that SMESERVER requires for opening an account is very limited and easy to do.
After you log in, you will see a toolbar at the top of the page that is always available. There is a link in the toolbar that is labeled with your username. This takes you to your "personal page". Use this page to introduce yourself and don't be shy. Write a word or two about your interests, especially those related to SMESERVER and Linux. If nothing else, tell us how you learned about SMESERVER.
Help Other Users
There is an active community in the forum that help all levels of SMESERVER users. Please have a look at the forum for an overview: http://forums.contribs.org
Suggest New Features or Software
Visit the BUGTRACKER NEW FEATURE RELEASE (NFR) page and add your suggestion:
Only software with an OSI-compliant open-source license will be added to the SMESERVER project.